Had a chance to attend a group discussion session yesterday. Probably the first, I have ever been part of. The subject of the discussion was: Is Small Really Beautiful.

While I was thinking that for such a simple topic people would talk about perception, definition of beauty, the very subjectivity of this definition and how irrelevant anything else is; be it size, shape, color, odor and anything else for that matter.

But I was in for a shock. The wannabe business students of India, were so keen to insert jargon that the whole discussion became futile and at the end of the day it was like a fish market, where every candidate was selling a new buzz word.

Don’t remember most of the answers but here are some. Judge the value of these answers yourself.

Small has to be beautiful. See Bharti it started small and how beautiful company it is.

All small things are beautiful. The computer chips, the electrons all these things are small and beautiful.

Small can never be beautiful. You see small people, from small places, smaller institutions always perform small and earn small. You need to think big to make big. A beautiful mind thinks big. So big is beautiful. Have you seen A beautiful mind, John Nash? And there was this other movie Life is beautiful …

Beauty starts small. The big bang was small and see how beautiful universe it has made. The cells, the protozoa, the mitochondria all important things are small. Small is always beautiful.

Switzerland is small and beautiful, (some another country name) is also small and beautiful. See big countries, India. Not at all beautiful. Big population, big problem.

Big is difficult to manage. Big companies don’t perform well, their share price goes down in the longer turn. One should not invest in big companies.

Sadly most of them forgot the beauty of simplicity in the course of discussion.